3. Good Shot
Good Shot
Flossie
Fourteen minutes is a long time when someone’s coming to kill you.
Sprout counts it down in intervals. “Contact bearing zero-four-seven mark twelve. Twelve minutes.” “Three vessels confirmed. Weapons signatures hot. Ten minutes.” “They have altered formation. Eight minutes.” Each update delivered in the flat white-glow voice that means Sprout has packed away every ounce of personality and become the thing it was built to be — a tactical system with opinions it is temporarily declining to share.
The Xarthian’s tail is still around my waist.
He hasn’t let go. Three and a half feet of prehensile muscle cinched around my midsection, pulling me behind him and the pilot’s chair, and the heat of it is denser than human warmth — radiating through my cardigan and the tactical vest underneath like a palm pressed flat against bare skin.
I can feel the grip tighten every time Sprout calls a new number. His body is counting too.
“They are splitting formation,” Sprout reports. “Two vessels converging on the SRS craft. One on approach to us.”
Through the viewport, I watch it happen.
The two merc ships bracket his vessel — fast, coordinated, the kind of formation that comes from practice rather than training — and open fire.
The first salvo punches through his portside hull like paper.
The second takes out the engine array. I can see the breaches opening in real time — amber wounds glowing against the dark, atmosphere venting in white plumes that catch the starlight and scatter it.
His power grid flickers. Lists. The ship is dying in clean, efficient stages, the way something dies when the people killing it have done this before.
He watches his ship come apart through my viewport and his face doesn’t change.
Not a flinch. Not a tightening. Nothing.
The gold eyes track the damage with the clinical precision of a man running a post-action assessment on someone else’s operation, and the only tell is his tail — the grip around my waist shifts, tightens, and the last six inches press flat against my hip in a way that has nothing to do with tactical positioning and everything to do with the fact that the only functional vessel in this corridor is the one he’s standing in, and the only warm thing in his immediate vicinity is me.
I don’t mention it. There are bigger problems than a tail.
“Four minutes,” Sprout says. “The third vessel is matching our airlock approach vector. They intend to board.”
“Right.” I put my hand on his tail. Not a stroke. Not a comfort. A tap — two fingers against the warm muscle, the way you’d tap someone’s shoulder to say move. “I need my waist back, lovey. Can’t shoot with you wrapped around me.”
His tail unwinds. The loss of heat is immediate — a cold stripe across my midsection where 103 degrees becomes ambient air, and I feel it more than I should.
My body catalogs the absence before my brain catches up, and then I’m drawing Betsy and the cataloging stops because Morrison trained the sentiment out of combat and what’s left is geometry.
He takes the starboard approach. I take portside.
We don’t discuss it. The positioning is instinctive — he fills the corridor toward the secondary airlock, I cover the primary, and the width of him in my peripheral vision is a wall someone forgot to install a door in.
The heat radiating off him reaches me from three feet away.
Combat warmth, I tell myself. Exertion. Nothing specific to him at all.
“Portside airlock breach in thirty seconds,” Sprout announces, orb blazing white. “Starboard breach in Fifty-five. They are attempting a pincer formation, which I would describe as ‘ambitious’ given the size of this corridor.”
Hands steady. Good. The rest of me can shake later.
The portside airlock blows.
The first merc comes through at a dead sprint and I put him down before his boots clear the threshold.
“Atta girl, Bets.” Stun bolt, center mass.
My wrist is steady and Betsy’s aim is true and the merc hits the deck plating with a sound like a sack of grain dropped from a shelf.
His partner is three seconds behind — I can hear the mag-boots on hull metal, the clumsy rhythm of someone who learned to board in atmosphere and never quite adapted to the magnetic pull.
Betsy handles him too. Two shots, two down, and Morrison’s voice in my head says good, again, don’t think yet.
“Two more incoming starboard. Fifteen seconds.”
The Xarthian is already moving. I don’t know when he drew a weapon — the motion was there and then it was finished, the way a card trick resolves itself before you’ve worked out what happened. He covers the starboard approach, back to me, every line braced.
Third merc. Starboard. Coming fast.
Morrison trained the thinking out of me years ago — crisis mode is all muscle memory and geometry, the angles of the corridor mapped in the time it takes to exhale. The merc clears the junction and the Xarthian is in my line of fire and I shoot over his shoulder.
The stun bolt passes three inches from his jaw.
Maybe less. Close enough that the discharge ripples through the fine down along his neck and cheek — dark fuzz standing on end in a wave, then settling.
I can see the individual texture of it from here.
Velvet-short. Dense at the jaw, thinning where it meets the geometric markings below his ear.
The kind of softness that has no business existing on a man built like a siege weapon.
The merc drops.
The Xarthian handles the last one before I’ve reacquired. A sound from the starboard junction — brief, percussive, the particular noise a body makes when it meets a wall at speed — and then silence. He’s not even breathing hard.
The corridor goes quiet. That particular kind of quiet that follows violence — ringing, charged, the air tasting of ozone and heated metal.
My hands are still steady. I notice this the way you notice something wrong — they should have stopped, should have had the half-second of tremor that comes after a stun bolt passes two and a half inches from the jaw of a man standing directly in front of you, but they didn’t, and they won’t, and Morrison’s voice says “good” again from somewhere in the back of my skull.
Good. Later I will find somewhere private and let them shake.
He turns his head. Not his body. His body stays oriented toward the starboard approach, combat-ready, every line of him braced for more. But his head turns, and those gold eyes find me over the ridge of his shoulder, and the look on his face is —
Not surprise. Not anger. Not gratitude.
Assessment. Complete and total. Like I’ve been reclassified in a filing system I don’t have access to, and the new category doesn’t have a name yet.
“Good shot.”
Low. Even. Two words, delivered with the same flat precision he uses for everything, except there’s a fractional drop in register that settles somewhere at the base of my spine and stays there.
I’ve been complimented on my aim before. Morrison, who never complimented anyone unless they’d earned it three times over. Dock workers. Other couriers. A customs officer on Relay Station Voss who asked me to dinner afterward and was very polite about the refusal.
Nobody who said it before was seven feet of crimson predator looking at me like I’m the most dangerous thing in the corridor and he can’t decide if that’s a problem or something else entirely.
“Betsy did the work.” I pat the grip. “I just point her.”
His gaze drops to the blaster — the daisy sticker, the etched barrel, my fingers resting easy on the grip — and something shifts behind those gold eyes.
A recalculation he didn’t want to make. His pupils are wider than they were in the cockpit.
The gold is darker at the edges, amber bleeding into something warmer.
I notice this because I notice things. That’s all.
“You fired within three inches of my jaw.”
“Two and a half, actually. I had room.”
The silence that follows is a full second longer than tactical assessment requires. His jaw works once, the muscle shifting under the dark edge of a marking, and I watch him decide not to say what he was going to say. Whatever filing system he’s using, the new category just got a footnote.
My grip tightens on Betsy. Not from fear. From the warmth spreading across my collarbones that has nothing to do with combat adrenaline and everything to do with the way he said shot like it was the most interesting word he’d encountered today. It needs to stop. It does not stop.
“All contacts neutralized,” Sprout reports. “I would like to note that the Xarthian’s tactical suit has sustained significant damage and his ship is currently venting atmosphere from three separate hull breaches. For the record.”
Right. His ship.
I saw it happen. Watched the breaches open through the viewport while his tail was around my waist and Sprout was counting down the minutes.
Three clean hits from professionals who knew exactly where to aim.
The ship is listing now, power grid dead, the kind of damage that doesn’t get fixed with a patch kit and optimism.
My ship is fine. Shields held. The Petal has taken worse.
My hand goes to the comms panel. Reflex.
Morrison’s voice in my head — don’t play hero, Knight — and for three seconds I want to hear the real version so badly my fingers ache.
Morrison would know what to do. Morrison always knows what to do.
That’s the deal: I fly into trouble and she talks me out of it, and between the two of us we’ve kept me alive for twelve years.